Staff Editor on May 6th, 2019

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By JEFF MILLER

Sublime’s “What I Got” was covered by not one but two bands at the inaugural BeachLife Festival, held this weekend, right on the boardwalk in Redondo Beach, and how you felt about the festival is probably aligned with the way you feel about that song: Either it’s an iconic, timeless beach anthem that sums up Cali sunshine and good vibes, or a treacly, overplayed nostalgia trip.

It was easy this weekend to fall in with the former, which is why BeachLife was a near-perfect first-year festival: With one of the two main stages set up right on the sand, a footprint with tons of space for the 10,000 or so attendees to have sitting or spinning room in the presence of those two stages and sun-splashed, 75-degree weather, it fell squarely into the “this is why we all live in Southern California” category.

BeachLife couldn’t have gone much better. Headliners Bob Weir, Willie Nelson, and Brian Wilson all delivered a slew of their respective hits, with one-off sit-ins sprinkled throughout: Wilson jammed with the guys from Dawes; Nelson played with John Popper and the Doors’ John Densmore; and Weir hosted Jackie Greene and Chris Robinson on “Not Fade Away,” after the latter delivered a crazy-good set of his old band the Black Crowes’ hits on Friday with his new-ish project As The Crow Flies. Sit-ins weren’t limited to the big sets, either: Pat Wilson from Weezer and man-about-skins Josh Freese played some drums with Chevy Metal, a sidemen-in-the-Foo Fighters side project that played a crowd-pleasing scrum of Van Halen songs to a boisterous, multi-generational crowd.

In fact, with hits from the ’60s through the ’00s the key element of many of the sets, nostalgia came hard for a few types of music fans on the field. The dream of the ’90s especially loomed large early in the day on Saturday and Sunday through strong showings from Everclear, Sugar Ray and Blues Traveller — the latter two covering the aforementioned Sublime song during their sing-along-required sets.

If it sounds sort of like the anti-Coachella, well, it was. The median age of attendees probably fell somewhere in the 40s, the longest line for food for most of the day was probably five people deep, the VIP experience (which included fine-dining dinners just to the side of the main stage from top L.A. chefs Michael Cimarusti, Tin Vuong and Devid Lefevre) was right in plain sight of the GA section, the whole thing was wrapped up by a very family-friendly 9 p.m. curfew. And anything requiring irony, fashion sense or pretention was nonexistent. Good.

Photos by Jessie Lee Cederblom, courtesy of BeachLife